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Khronos announce WebGL initiative

The Khronos Group has announced WebGL, a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 with industry support from Google, Mozilla and Opera. The specification, which will be available royalty free, builds on HTML5 concepts such as the Canvas element and aims to eliminate the need for plug-ins to get hardware accelerated 3D graphics.

Khronos hopes to publically release the WebGL specification in the first half of 2010, and invites interested companies to become members and participate in the development of the final specification. Arun Ranganathan of Mozilla, and chair of the WebGL Working Group, said "We think 3D is the next step for Firefox" and looked forward to "3D-enriched Web applications within Canvas".

The Khronos group is accepting feedback on the WebGL announcment already and Nail Trevett, president of the Group and VP at NVidia, added "Khronos will be reaching out to the key Web standards groups and the wider community to ensure WebGL is an appropriate, dynamic and enabling piece of the Web ecosystem.”

Among those not, at this time, publically supporting WebGL, are Microsoft and Apple, although in Apple, as Google uses and enhances Apple's open source WebKit engine in its Chrome browser, may have an easier job of supporting WebGL than Microsoft.